Remove links in "Last Post" column.
 

I would like to remove live links to the posts that show up in the "Last Post" column on the index.php page.

The reason for this is to prevent potential duplicate content penalties with search engines since "archive" and "forumdisplay" already point to the post using a different URL.

Any ideas on how to do that safely?

turn off the last post column on index?

I don't want to turn off the "Last Post" column I only want to remove the link to the post.

Any ideas?

You're looking at this the wrong way - the search engines don't see duplicate content with the last post column, unless they are linking to separate URLs with duplicate content.

On your forum index, you have a link to the forum, plus links to threads. The worst thing you have in your last post column is bookmarked areas of those threads - no duplicate, no foul.

If you're running an Apache Webserver with PHP (the chance is, you probably are), check your search-friendly archive settings (admincp|vBulletin Options|Search Engine Friendly Archive) and be done with it.

Yes, the archive lists one and the forum another, but the content is still not duplicated. To the unaided eye of the browser, the words may be the same, but to the eye of the SE spider, they are different pages. Look at the source of each and you'll see what I mean. Then consider that the SE spiders will generally look at one or the other, not both.

Here is a test I just ran to demonstrate my concern:

I took a URL to a post from the forum home page in the "Last Post" section:
http://www.resalebroker.com/real-est...?t=177#post355

I then found the URL to the same thread/post in the archive:
http://www.resalebroker.com/real-est...read.php?t=177

I then ran both URLs through a similar page checker and here are the results:

http://www.resalebroker.com/real-est...read.php?t=177
is 97.821350762527% percentage similar to
http://www.resalebroker.com/real-est...?t=177#post355

Not Good!

just edit the forumhome_lastpost template then and remove the link

Thanks!:)